| LATEST ARTICLES & COMMENTARY Theoretical physics-Geometry Is All The new “theory of everything” --it's all just math! Einstein's Legacy-Where are the "Einsteinians?" By Lee Smolin How many professional physicists are Einsteinians? Religion Be Damned Richard Dawkins defends the godless among us. The Bright Stuff By Daniel C. Dennett, What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view... |
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| EVOLUTIONARY GERM THEORY Yes! According to a growing body of scientists, many chronic illnesses such cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and even schizophrenia may be caused by germs! Read about Amherst biology professor Paul Ewald's GERM THEORY. I think this one is right on target. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing about the primitive ideas people held about disease at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the same way we make fun of some of the primitive medical practices of the nineteenth century. _____________________________________________________________ More about germ theory from Scientific American: "Ask the average American about chlamydia, and you will probably evoke an uneasy cringe. Most people think immediately of one of the world's most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). But the term actually refers to an entire genus of tiny bacteria that can ignite a variety of serious illnesses." <snip> "Researchers have even drawn tentative links between C. pneumoniae and atherosclerosis, the artery-narrowing condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes." "In industrial countries, an airborne species, C. pneumoniae, causes colds, bronchitis and about 10 percent of pneumonias acquired outside of hospitals. Researchers have even drawn tentative links between C. pneumoniae and atherosclerosis, the artery-narrowing condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes." _____________________________________________________________ More Germ Theory: "Who and What Are The We In We?" From Paul Ewald at The Edge World Question Center "It is now well known that great achievers are disproportionately likely to suffer from mental illnesses. Severe mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder, are much more common among the greatest novelists, poets, painters, and musicians, than among your everyday H. sapiens, especially in recent centuries as the great accomplishments have become more abstract, that is, less normal." <snip> "At this level of accomplishment it is looking more and more like the we in we do not just belong to Homo sapiens but also to a variety of parasitic species. It may include human herpes simplex virus, borna disease virus, Toxoplasma gondii, and many more yet to be discovered species that alter the functioning of our brains, usually for the worse, but occasionally generating minds of unusual insight." _____________________________________________________________ More Germ Theory 7 March 2002 "Can you catch a heart attack? Is cancer contagious? The conventional answer is no; these diseases are caused by bad genes and bad diet. But a revolutionary band of scientists thinks these sicknesses are actually caused by infections bugs." _____________________________________________________________ More Germ Theory Smug as a Bug He was so sure he was right and conventional medical wisdom wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers that he swallowed bacteria to prove his point... ___________________________________________________________ Evidence Germs Cause Obesity August 21, 2007 Common Virus Boosts Fat-Cell Production -- Makes Fat Cells Fatter By Daniel J. DeNoon WebMD Medical News -Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD Infection with a virus linked to human obesity ups fat-cell production and makes fat cells fatter. "Infectobesity" is the term coined by Louisiana State University researcher Nikhil Dhurandhar, PhD, and colleagues to describe the phenomenon. Their research strongly links a common human virus -- adenovirus-36 or Ad-36 -- to human obesity. ______________________________________________________________ Plague Time By Paul Ewald According to conventional wisdom, our genes and lifestyles are the most important causes of the most deadly ailments of our time. Conventional wisdom may be wrong. In this controversial book, the eminent biologist Paul W. Ewald offers some startling arguments: -Germs appear to be at the root of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, many forms of cancer, and other chronic diseases. -The greatest threats to our health come not from sensational killers such as Ebola, West Nile virus, and super-virulent strains of influenza, but from agents that are already here causing long-term infections, which eventually lead to debilitation and death. -The medical establishment has largely ignored the evidence that implicates these germs, to the detriment of our public health. -New evolutionary theories are available, which explain how germs function and offer opportunities for controlling these modern plagues — if we are willing to listen to them. Plague Time is an eye-opening exploration of the revolutionary new understanding of disease that may set the course of medical research for the twenty-first century. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK “Could change medicine as profoundly during the 21st century as germ theory did in the 20th.”–Newsweek “Could revolutionize the treatment of serious chronic disease.”–Richard Rhodes “Has gems of insight and imagery which mark out its author as a master explainer.”–Richard Dawkins “Paul Ewald’s important, compelling book could revolutionize the treatment of serious chronic disease. I couldn’t put it down.” —Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Deadly Feasts "Provocative. . . . If correct, this theory will change the course of medicine." —Scientific American “Paul Ewald is one of the liveliest and most original thinkers about disease. . . . Plague Time contains a new feast of his astonishing insights.” —Mark Ridley, author of The Cooperative Gene |
| CONSCIOUSNESS- less seriously considered. From The Religion War by Scott Adams "Consciousness is a feedback loop," explained the Avatar. It has four parts: You imagine the impact of your action, then you act, then you observe the actual result of your action, then you store that knowledge in your brain and begin again to imagine the next thing. All those steps have a physical component, including the imagining--meaning that your brain is having chemical and electrical activity-- so it's no wonder that you have a sensation that you call consciousness," explained the Avatar. This excerpt was taken from a sweet little fiction book by Scott Adams called The Religion War, which is the sequel to Adams' first philosophy book (reviewed below) called God's Debris. The main character, the Avatar offers plausible answers to all sorts of timeless questions about man and god and war and he comes surprisingly close to what I imagine is the truth, with much of it-- including his simplistic description of consciousness above. Both are wonderful books and I highly recommend them. Read them in sequence...i.e., God's Debris first. |
| "THE END OF TIME; A NEW PHYSICS by Julian Barbour "...time is an illusion. The phenomena from which we deduce its existence are real, but we interpret them wrongly." Julian Barbour This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read on the question of time-- and I think it is true. Barbour is a theoretical physicist living in Oxford England specializing in the study of time and inertia and he is also the author of Absolute or Relative Motion and The Discovery of Dynamics. "The most interesting and provocative idea about time to be proposed in many years. If true, it will change the way we see reality." Lee Smolin Read an interview with Barbour at EDGE, one of my favorite websites or visit Barbour's webpage Platonia for more.. |
| CONSCIOUSNESS- The CEMI Field Theory In my ongoing investigation of consciousness, I've been reading Johnjoe McFadden, School of Biomedical & Life Sciences at the University of Surrey, UK. and Susan Pockett a neuroscientist at the University of Aukland, New Zealand who both argue independently, that consciousness is an electromagnetic field, in essence, a by-product of the electrical activity produced by neuronal firing. McFadden has published two very interesting papers on CEMI Field Theory in the Journal for Consciousness Studies, entitled: Synchronous Firing & its Influence On the Brains Electromagnetic Field: Evidence for an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness- Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(4):23-50 2002. The Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory; the Hard Problem Made Easy Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(8):45-60 2002. A brief description of the theory, abstracts, and both papers (full-text pdf. files) along with other links and information can be found at McFadden's website. Susan Pockett writes in the preface to her book "The Nature of Consciousness": "The essence of the present hypothesis can be stated in one sentence. It is that consciousness is identical with certain spatiotemporal patterns in the electro-magnetic field. "Now if this hypothesis is true it may not be overstating the case to say that it solves the mind-body problem at a stroke. If it is true, then consciousness is not material in the usually accepted sense, but neither is it some kind of non-physical spook (which, being non-physical is therefore, not accessible to scientific investigation.) Consciousness (or at least normal human consciousness) is a local brain-generated configuration of, or pattern in, the electromagnetic field." Browse Susan Pockett's book online. I won't say anything here about some of the implications of consciousness as an electromagnetic field, but they are profound. |
| MORE ABOUT TIME or lack thereof A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau, an Associate Professor From the Publisher "It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Goedel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Goedel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Goedel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Goedel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away." From Publishers Weekly "What if time is only an illusion, if it doesn't actually exist? Yourgrau, a Brandeis professor of philosophy, explains that Einstein's general theory of relativity may allow for this possibility, first realized by the great logician Kurt Godel. Godel is best known for his incompleteness theorem, one of the most important theorems in mathematical logic since Euclid..." |
| "Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity." David Bohm. |
| "Is The Universe Really Expanding? Or: Did Einstein Get It Exactly Right?" by Julian Barbour "As I prepare to head for Cambridge (the Brits' one) for the conference to mark Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday, I know that the suggestion I am just about to make will strike the great and the good who are assembling for the event as my scientific suicide note. Suggesting time does not exist is not half as dangerous for one's reputation as questioning the expansion of the universe. That is currently believed as firmly as terrestrial immobility in the happy pre-Copernican days. Yet the idea that the universe in its totality is expanding is odd to say the least. Surely things like size are relative? With respect to what can one say the universe expands?" |
| Links: The Edge The Brights Network Interviews with Dan Dennett Consciousness Being Good Without God Directions of Evolution Quantum Weirdness |
| God's Debris by Scott Adams Review by Steve McCardell "Along the way, Adams certainly pokes and prods his readers, forcing questions that must make them squirm. "If people believed in God," he points out, "they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone would be frantic to determine which religion was the true one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives to converting others to their religions." He adds: "If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck." Now, do you believe in God?... |
| LOOP QUANTUM GRAVITY: By Lee Smolin LEE SMOLIN, a theoretical physicist, is concerned with quantum gravity, "the name we give to the theory that unifies all the physics now under construction." More specifically, he is a co-inventor of an approach called loop quantum gravity. In 2001, he became a founding member and research physicist of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario. Smolin is the author of The Life of The Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. "It's only since the middle 1980s that real progress began to be made on unifying relativity and quantum theory. "Another big development of loop quantum gravity is that we now know how to describe not only space but spacetime—including causality, light cones, and so on—in loop quantum gravity. Spacetime also turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called a spin foam. Recently there have been important results showing that dynamical calculations in spin-foam models come out finite. Together these two results strongly suggest that loop quantum gravity is giving us sensible answers to questions about the nature of space and time on the shortest scales." |
| BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS The God Delsusion by Richard Dawkins From a Joan Bakewell review "With his usual rational skills he sets about dissecting the arguments for the existence of a God. He takes on all comers: Aquinas's five "proofs", Pascal's wager (meant as a joke, surely), even Stephen Unwin's probability of God, whose use of Bayes' theorem to demonstrate the probability of God Dawkins scathingly dismisses as "quite agreeably funny". He puts in its place the believers' misunderstanding of Darwinism. No, it does not mean that we are all here by chance, but by a scientifically demonstrable process of natural selection. His scorn for believers is evident throughout. "He speaks of "a mind hijacked by religion" and finds "sucking up to God" a strange rationale for doing good. He is, not surprisingly, appalled by the jealous rage of the God of the Old Testament (lovingly putting Abraham to the test of killing his only son) and has sharp things to say about..." The End of Faith by Sam Harris Summary from his website: "The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities..." ”The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood… Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America… This is an important book...” — Natalie Angier, The New York Times Book Review Letter to A Christian Nation "In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In the course of his argument, he addresses current topics ranging from intelligent design and stem-cell research to the connections between religion and violence. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris boldly challenges the influence that faith has on public life in the United States." |
| The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High By Nick Bostrom Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Dept. of Philosophy Oxford University ...there is a significant probability that you are living in computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation. What grounds could we have for taking this hypothesis seriously... ABSTRACT to Bostrom's original paper published in Philosophical Quarterly This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. |